For his Black Panther photography assignment, Keith Major, the photo director at Ebony magazine, looked for the best angles. Then he pulled out his Google Pixel 7 Pro, taking advantage of its multi-lens camera system to take portraits of stars Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Letitia Wright, Dominique Thorne, and Danai Gurira.

When Major started thinking about Ebony’s digital cover for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”, he kept thinking about Afrofuturism, an aesthetic that combines sci-fi with Black history to create a futuristic fantasy. “Our mantra is ‘Moving Black Forward,’ and nothing is more forward than the Afrofuturism of Black Panther,” Major says.

To accurately highlight diverse skin tones, the magazine reached out to Google and asked if they could use the new Pixel 7 Pro. Real Tone on Pixel is a set of camera improvements that helps the phone make every picture more representative of the subject in the photo, and is therefore ideal for darker skin photography. Effectively a darker skin photo editor.

“We wanted to illustrate the Black Panther cast at their best in all photos – that means putting them in their best light, and revealing their most accurate skin tones,” Major says. 

Major, who is known for his nuanced portraits of people of colour, created images that were stunning – and showed his subjects as they are in real life. “The eye does things that cameras can’t do,” Major explains, adding that with the Google Pixel 7 Pro, “we made one big step closer to how the eye captures imagery.”

Skin tone bias in smartphone cameras has its roots in the way the camera technology was developed. Camera sensors and processing algorithms were trained on a limited range of skin tones, meaning that darker skin was often rendered unnaturally. Real Tone improves the way Pixel processes different skin tones, helping it recognise a broader set of faces, making skin brightness appear more natural, and keeping faces from looking washed out. 

Real Tone is therefore tailor-made for darker skin photography. It makes it possible to optimise colour and lighting to account for darker skin tones, which means that Major can now create photographs that are truer to how his subjects look. He still used studio lights for the photography session, but did not have to worry about calibrating them for the camera. Instead, Major was free to focus on composing the most beautiful image he could.

While he also brought his usual professional cameras to the Black Panther photography session for the print images, some of his favourite Black Panther cast photos were taken with the Pixel. He recalls the photographs that he took of Winston Duke, who plays M’Baku. “There were shots of him that I took with the Pixel that are just burned into my mind. I can see it right now – these strong portraits of this majestic Black man,” Major says.

For the Black Panther photography spread, he began by using one of his professional cameras. After finding the right framing for the photo, he would switch to the Pixel 7 Pro.

Using the Pixel significantly improved Major’s process, helping him take photos faster.¹ Instead of squinting through the small viewfinder of his professional camera, Major saw his subjects on Pixel 7 Pro’s super-sharp 6.7" high-definition display.² It made it easy to see whether the composition was just right. “As a professional photographer, I like the large screen,” Major says. “I like that at my fingertips, I can find focus points, and I can see the entire image right away.”

Major says the process worked so well that he expects to use Pixel 7 Pro for future photography sessions. “It’s easy to see how, going forward, it would be possible to shoot the entire thing with the Pixel 7,” Major says.